Broadsword56

And I think that's why the team or squad leader so often becomes the first casualty in CMBN.

+1 to that -- but what I find particularly annoying is the bright orange disc that marks TRPs during battle -- nice when you want to use the TRPs, but awful to see the rest of the time. The orange markers stay lit even when you turn icons off (unless I'm overlooking another command to toggle off TRPs). It spoils immersion during play to see those neon orange discs, and it requires more editing of screenshots to keep them from spoiling the scene.

Hide is to really hide -- to lie down and take cover, not to ambush or shoot. Hide is essential to an ambush before the enemy arrives in the vicinity, so your ambush team doesn't get spotted first. But then you have to manually "unhide" your ambush team at the right moment to spring the trap. One challenge is timing this "unhide" moment. The other challenge is spotting: When your team is hiding they also don't see as well. So they could miss the approaching enemy or get ambushed themselves. But this is the same dilemma soldiers have in real life. One solution: Have another team (preferably one with binoculars and the power to call in artillery), not on "hide" but keeping still and in good concealment, with LOS into the ambush zone. This team should be as far away as possible from the ambush while still able to see it clearly. Now you have a better chance of seeing the enemy first and knowing the right moment to ambush. Is this gamey "borg-spotting?" Not in my opinion, if the spotting and ambushing units are within, say, visual or voice range (which you'd want anyway to keep the ambushing unit in command if the spotting unit is its commander). Soldiers used all sorts of whistles and signals on the battlefield to alert each other -- the Germans in Normandy reportedly imitated cuckoo calls to signal each other.

I can confirm that 4.2" mortars require an FO.

I just had this situation in a HTH wego battle -- my American FO managed to call in a 4.2" chemical mortar strike from the XIX Corps artillery general support pool, and then had to dash for cover, only to get ambushed and killed before even the spotting rounds arrived. I wondered what was going to happen -- whether the mission would happen at all, whether there would just be lots of random spotting rounds and no FFE, or what. What happened was interesting: Quite a few turns after the official delay (according to the artillery GUI) big HE spotting rounds started impacting on the map -- nowhere near where the FO had plotted them, and some in empty areas, but some others just happened to land in on or near some enemy-held areas and may have done some good. The FFE never came, but it felt as if Corps was aware of this company's plight and the FO's dying gasps over the radio, and was trying to help from afar as best it could.

To be fair, BFC clearly has been willing to compromise when a feature is critical to the game: we've seen this with foxholes and with fighting inside buildings, which involve various workarounds and abstractions.

OK, sorry -- I understand now. Yes, that was my intention with the 4x4 km master map I posted, but even that turned out to be too much for CMBN to handle. Ultimately, there was no alternative for battles other than to cut down the master map to about a battalion's area. On the plus side, that size of map can be detailed to your heart's content.

If fire is such an insoluble problem from the designers' POV, then I'd rather see Crocs in the game with fire abstracted -- so that you hear the flamethrower sound, see the flaming jet, and see the flames only on the target (if hit) or as a blackened decal on the terrain (if area fired or target is missed). But at least the Crocs would be present and the Commonwealth forces would have the benefit of them when assaulting fortified positions, towns, etc. I can live without the spreading effects, burning objects and buildings, smoke, etc., if necessary. The operations around Caen were tough enough for the Commonwealth without depriving them of a tank that was standard (though limited) in their armored battalions.

Thanks for posting this! Just a suggestion: You really should consider trying Vein's Tracers mod -- they look fantastic at night and are huge improvements over the "ray gun" tracer appearance in the vanilla game (which I can barely stand to look at anymore).

LLF, it's your map and your choice which direction to go with it, but I have to disagree with Sgt. Schultz on this -- please, please don't distort the authenticity of the map for the sake of trying to making it playable. The whole point of a "master map" concept IMHO is to serve as a template and a guide for accurate battle maps and campaigns. Taking out the placeholder lines of weeds does nothing to make the map load any better, but it would erase things that existed on the battlefield -- and if you're going to do that, what was the point of all that research and line-drawing? Let someone else edit their own copy of your master map and make a fictional one out of it, if that's what they want to do.

Outstanding work, LLF!!! Can't wait to get this! I think you took exactly the right approach with this master map -- weeds as borders, placeholder buildings, basic enough to avoid crashes but detailed enough to make it easy and quick to break into detailed battle submaps. Here's a suggestion on the ditches and depressions and elevations you wish you could include: How about drawing them on a JPEG and including them in a readme with the map file, so that anyone making submaps would at least know where they are supposed to go and be able to place them? That way, all your meticulous research could still be put to good use. I know we all wish a map like this could run in full detail. But -- if it's any consolation -- this isn't actually as much of a problem in bocage fighting. As historians and commanders of the time have said, the July battles were really "a battalion commander's war." So even if battalions were adjacent/overlapping, they really couldn't coordinate their actions very effectively in the time scale of CMBN battles. If a submap battle takes place in an area where two battalions overlapped, we can just include elements of both battalions in the OOB, along with their command HQs. The player would have more challenges with C2 than if there were one command with one HQ, but that would be realistic.

I'm not authorized to disclose this, but OK, since you asked: It was a sneak preview of the new module, "Normandy on Acid"

Perfect timing! sburke's Jagdpanzer IV lates are just coming into view now near Choisy Crossroads and the new mod will make them all the more pleasing to watch as they brew up...

Delighted at the news! Thanks so much for the bone. The absence of the Sherman Crocodile is going to rule out historically accurate OOBs and battles for the British sector in certain times and places, unfortunately. I'll have to research a bit to figure out which maps and operations I should create and which ones to avoid. If anyone has a definitive list of which specific British units in Normandy had the Croc and/or AVRE (and when), and wanted to post it, that would be a handy thing.

Yes SteveP, in real life this was absolutely true. In CMBN, however, the way the bocage is simulated on game maps can vary widely. So my point was just that it's important to do our best to make the bocage as realistic as possible within the limits of the game engine. Try the La Nicollerie HTH map I uploaded to the repository the other day and see what I mean. Attacking on that map is extremely tough, but at least there's plenty of room to try different approaches and the bocage has many gaps and wormholes so the attacker isn't facing a "solid green wall." Also, the liberal use of weeds and brush and realistic placements of orchards, etc., can offer more covered approaches than a less detailed "billiard table" map (sburke said when we battled on the La Nicollerie map that it "felt more like jungle fighting")!

True, but a lot of this also depends on the map and scenario designs. Many maps can be too small for maneuver/recon and tend to force players into frontal attacks. "Bad maps make for bad tactics," I often say. IRL, it's often going to be hard for a defender to defend everything. Something will have to be left weaker or less defended because there simply won't be enough troops to defend everything in strength. In CMBN, small maps, plus the tendency of QB players or scenario designers to create "balanced" OOBs, means defenders will more often be able to cover the necessary areas. How often do we see CMBN battles where the attacker outnumbers the defenders 3:1 or even 6:1? But those are the odds a commander would want, or he might never launch the attack at all.

The photos are well done and really set the mood for the game. They also give me a little reminder that real people lived (and died) in the battles I'm about to see.

Ranger is right. Find the gaps or softer spots and engage first with the smallest possible force (in this game, say, a scout team). If it hits resistance, flow around it and look for another gap. When you find a gap, let your scouts "pull" your lead elements through behind them. Once you've found the point you want to attack the enemy, use your second force to fix them in place and suppress them. Then once they're fixed in place, use your third force to flank and finish them. Think of the way water flows over rock and finds the smallest possible opening, then forces it wider and wider until the rock gives way. Attack the gaps, not the surfaces. Reinforce success, not failure. Here's a link to a good presentation on the concept of "recon pull" and maneuver warfare: http://www.dnipogo.org/fcs/ppt/walters_dist_ops_history.ppt#256,1,Distributed Operations and Command: A Brief Historical Perspective

Just uploaded to the repository: Designer's notes: La Nicollerie is a 1040m x 1120m large bocage map, based on authentic Google Earth imagery and topography and 1947 French aerial photos of this area near Villiers-Fossard. The map is a detailed submap of my 4km x 4km XIX Corps-Center master map that I made and posted on the BFC repository. The map has been playtested twice in PBEM play with delightful results. But I stongly advise that you play this map HTH ONLY, because the map eventually crashed CMBN both times it was played via PBEM. To play HTH, set up your battle as a head-to-head hotseat 2-player game. Then save your turn and send the actual game file (the .BTS file) back and forth. This seems to be a more stable way to play large maps, and it keeps the file size down. Terrain notes: All fields with bocage borders have logically placed entrances and exits, to represent what the farmers and animals used to come and go. These are marked with dirt and/or mud tiles. BUT... these spaces would not necessarily have been wide enough for WWII vehicles. So here's the key: Entrances/exits that are NOT accessible to vehicles appear on the map in two forms: 1. A bocage "gap" over a dirt or mud tile -- passable only by infantry on foot, unless/until it's widened by artificial means (Rhino tanks, demolition, HE fire, etc.). 2. A wooden gate -- These are placed over heavy forest tiles, so that stops vehicles from crossing them. The gates make it easy to spot vehicle-unfriendly gaps, so you don't have to resort to frustrating trial and error. Exits/entrances that vehicles CAN cross appear on the map as open action spaces (no gate), marked by dirt and/or mud tiles. These often occur on larger fields and wheatfields. Remember that in addition to marked entrances/exits, bocage has many random gaps and thin spots that foot infantry can move and shoot through. They're all over the map, but you have to find these on your own and decide how to make the best use of them! --Broadsword56

@sburke Thank you for the positive feedback on the two battle maps we've played that were based on the master map. I think I will release La Nicollerie as just a map, with the warning that people should play it HTH and not PBEM or it's likely to crash at a certain point. @The Steppenwulf A very ambitious but commendable project you've dreamed up -- but with your programming chops I daresay you have a good chance of achieving it. I use Google Earth to get the authentic terrain for my maps. Once you learn how to use jpeg overlays and draw polygons on Google Earth, it's easy to define an area, set contour lines, take a jpeg, and then scale it in a graphics program (I use The Gimp) to 1 pixel per meter. I also use historical maps, wargame maps, and 1947 French aerial photos as semitransparent overlays in Google Earth, just to see how today's landscape and yesterday's maps match up. That, to me, is really one of the most fun parts of mapping -- to flick the transparency slider back and forth, peeling back 60+ years to see what has changed or remained the same in one spot of France.

Thanks for the comments! The master map is supportable by the editor but apparently not playable in its full size in the game, once objects are added. I made it entirely in the game's editor, no fancy tricks there. I don't have a larger map under development, but LongLeftFlank has been working on an a similar concept master map that adjoins mine on the west edge and takes it out another several km. Once we have the next module (which gives us the German paratroop units), I may make another master map that extends this one to the east end of the XIX Corps boundary. The idea with all of these is that you play a campaign using another wargame (a boardgame, typically) and then wherever there's a battle you like, you pause the boardgame and set up that battle on an area of your master map. You have to then cut in the edges of your battle map to just the needed area, and then place all the objects, bocage, etc., using the master map as your pattern. I find I can make a great-looking battle map this way in about 5 days to a week. The most tedious part is laying down all the bocage lines along the dark green lines of the master map. But after that it's very easy and fun.

Speaking of the new module: I've been looking over board wargames that would make a good operational layer for the Commonwealth/SS/FJ module, in the same way I've been using St-Lo so for vanilla CMBN so far. Unfortunately it seems the British sector hasn't been wargamed as well or as thoroughly at battalion/company scale as the US sector (bracing to be flamed here). But I now have a copy of Panzer Genadier:Beyond Normandy and I think it will do nicely, even though its scale is between tactical and operational -- units are platoons, maps are 200m per hex, and battles can be fought with forces as large as brigades. The scenario book as 50 (!) scenarios covering the June-July battles for Hill 112 southwest of Caen, and they'd all be easy to set up as CMBN scenarios.

Agreed, and an example of this is happening right now: The operational level boardgame I'm using to control/set up CMBN battles (Saint Lo) has generated a German surprise counterattack at dawn (Inf battalion + engineer platoon + elements of jagdpanzer and stug companies) against the flank of a tired and inexperienced US infantry company. Overnight on July 12, the US corps artillery in the op game spent a lot of its available fire missions on long-range interdiction and counterbattery fire. Now the Germans are attacking at dawn on July 13, and the US company has only "limited" ammunition for the offmap defensive fire support. But the guns on call are good ones: A full 12-tube battalion of 4.2" chemical mortars from the 82nd Chemical Mortar Bn/320th Infantry. Just an example of an interesting, realistic, and offbeat situation that an op game can generate, which might not happen so often in quickbattles or one-off scenarios.

But if you use the 107 (4.2 inch) mortars, be sure you also have an FO unit -- because only an FO can call in missions for them. Even a battalion commander doesn't have sufficient authority to use them and they will show up "denied" his fire support window.

It would be cool if that could be modded so it looks like outer (but nonplayable) terrain. Then we could insert, say, an 8 x 8km image of the far terrain area that borders the actual playing area of the map (the way mapping worked in Theatre of War 2: Africa 1943)